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October 10, 2011

Mr. James Van Praagh:

I’m sure you received my letter of Sept. 9 encouraging you to accept the James Randi Educational Foundation’s Million Dollar Challenge by agreeing to demonstrate your claimed psychic powers in a fair, mutually-agreed-upon test, under conditions that would prevent cheating. The certified letter was confirmed to have been picked up from your local post office.

We also sent the letter to you via email. During the week prior to that, our challenge to you was covered by ABC News and Time.com. AOL News reached out to you for an answer, but you didn’t reply to them either. All this time, you have refused to give an honest answer to the question of whether or not you’ll accept our challenge.

It seems odd that you won’t return our messages. After all, if you can really do what you claim, we’re offering you one million dollars and a chance to prove wrong everyone who doubts you, including those of us at the James Randi Educational Foundation. If your ‘psychic powers’ are real, hiding from our offer makes as much sense as throwing away a winning lottery ticket.

So, we can only guess at why you haven’t answered.

Perhaps it’s because what you do is not “psychic” at all, but a stale and repetitive performance of cold-reading techniques, in which you throw out vague guesses and then repeat back to your audience things they’ve already told you or things that are simply obvious, all while claiming their dead relatives are speaking to you.

Perhaps it’s because you were just exposed on ABC’s Primetime Nightline for stuffing your reading of an ABC correspondent with personal facts that were publicly available with a simple internet search, but which you claimed were revealed to you by spirits.